political philosophy

08/16/2017

One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent antisemitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago, but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then its findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was De Rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs — a decision which might be correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism was on the up-grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and intelligent people. This was particularly noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking person felt that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate foreigners who for the most part were only in England because they were opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very eminent figure in the Labour Party — I won't name him, but he is one of the most respected people in England — said to me quite violently: “We never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences.” Yet this man would as a matter of course have associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it.--Orwell, (1945) "Antisemitism in Britain."

That Donald Trump is willing to express his racism has long been obvious since David Letterman made it visible in 2011-12. Even then it was clear (to Entertainment Weekly) he was considering a political run. Unlike Letterman, and most commentators I read, I was not surprised that he held racist views 'in America today.' In fact, such a belief in individual moral progress, which springs from a desire for the sinner's redemption, prevents clear thinking.*

Call me an Augustinian, if you wish, but most people are rotten enough to have negative views about some other group of people (recall). Ideally, the out-group is far away, and then our views, which may not be our ruling passions, have no consequence. When we live among the other group, we exercise self-command due to the judgments of our better selves, public norms, company policies, and enlightened self-interest (the offended may be our colleagues, business partners, etc.); so we exhibit self-command unless we feel at ease enough -- say, because of alcohol and the company of the demographic like-minded -- to express some of our rot. Sometimes, sudden stress, panic, and anger make us forget our self-command and we act on our wrong impulses (as some badly trained US police-officers have been caught doing). If the public norms are strong enough, they support a wide gap between our private views and the impartial laws of the land, then our private views are largely irrelevant to political life even if we can create local nuisance or worse. Of course, the previous paragraph presupposes two liberal commitments: (i) the utility of a distinction between private and public; (ii) the significance and value of impartial law.

Ideal circumstances rarely obtain. A key factor today is that offense against social norms is profitable in our media economy. It sells in two ways: as humor (see Justin Smith) and as (aesthetic) spectacle. By 'spectacle,' I mean, it creates gripping, attention-grabbing imagery on-line and on TV. The for-profit media, thus, have an incentive to promote funny characters that offend against social norms.** What makes Letterman's comments (ca 2012) so useful is because it reminds us that Donald Trump's media presence was promoted long after it became clear that he not only harbored intense racist views, and as a landlord acted on them, but that (already back in 1989) he was actively promoting racist outcomes in public life (the Central Park 5) long before he encouraged birtherism. The fact that (and again just listen to Letterman) that he was very wealthy, funny, and not stupid encouraged the media to keep giving him air time and so spread his views that violate existing social norms. Once the genie was out of the bottle, any outlet that refused to play along was leaving dollars on the table because Trump has perfected the art of creating often funny, self-reinforcing media spectacles that turn on his persona. A third liberal commitment, the (iii) freedom for profitable speech became a launching path for Trump's political career.

In addition to being profitable to the media, the attention aided Trump's political rise. In the presidential campaign, this rise was facilitated, first, by the inability of his (Republican) opponents to take him seriously as a political force and, then, the Clinton campaign team blundered by turning the election into a referendum on his character, thus, playing straight into his media strengths. That the Clinton campaign failed to grasp these dynamics is especially astounding because Bill Clinton's first presidential run was propelled by him turning the (racialized, law & order) execution of Ricky Ray Rector into a favorable spectacle.

That liberal democracies elect flawed, even racist characters to power is no surprise. It is also no surprise that they do so, in part, because these characters are racists. As I remarked before, when (parts of) electorates understand their own situations as zero-sum, it is completely rational for them to wish to be represented by characters who they take to be on their side (recall here; and here)--and ethnic identification is, precisely because it is so visceral, a useful heuristic toward group solidarity.*** Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville tells you that he is gambling on the fact that many voters will vote for him, again, primarily because of his willingness to support rather intense ethnic identification. I would not bet against him, although it is entirely possible to defeat such a program if other factors are made more salient. That is to say, the conversation needs to be changed--as long as Trump's persona is the center of attention he has good chances of staying in power.

Technological surveillance and monitoring capabilities have collapsed the capacity to maintain a meaningful distinction between private and public. Only a draconian law could maintain the distinction. But there is no reason to expect such a law to be even modestly impartial. And it is manifestly obvious that the proponents of such a law would propose it as a tool to silence critics. For, above I treated the rule of law as an abstraction, but, of course, the impartiality and decency of law rest on human judgment (to interpret, to enforce, and to adjudicate). President Trump and his team are shaping these processes even further toward ethnic partiality (aided by other interests, who also happen to benefit). Along the way, they signal increasingly that would-be-violators of the law, such as it is, can count on ethnic solidarity and presidential pardons. Because the executive branch is a vast direct and indirect patronage network, it has ample opportunities to attract talented public servants (some of this encouraged by misguided philosophers) and reward their loyalty. Even minimal competence is sufficient to sustain itself for quite a while.+ It is foreseeable that as trust in the rule of law is further eroded, conflict and chaos will increase and, thereby, strengthen the public's tolerance for ethno-nationalist, authoritarian rule.

The experience of the last hundred years tells us that even imperfect, liberal democracies, many of them with a history of racialized empire and domestic, ethnic hierarchy, can survive stagnating incomes, oligarchic privilege, the collapse/bail-outs of financial sector, and even total war. So, it is not impossible that the liberal form of constitutional government can survive a Trump (who is mortal) presidency. But even when his ethnic-nationalist program gets defeated some day Stateside, or if liberalism has to retreat permanently to the world's margins, the theoretical challenge is, in part, to think what liberalism could be without a meaningful distinction between private and public, while we continue to embrace freedom for profitable speech which makes ethno-nationalism so rewarding.++

08/14/2017

Before I explain my reasons, I wish to make two preliminary points. First, when I started blogging about Donald Trump,* prompted by an editorial by Jason Stanley, in December 2015, I did not expect him to become President (although did not rule it out). But I did quickly grasp that he is an important phenomenon (see here [Dec 2015]; and here [may 2016], a symptom for a wider malaise, a signal of underlying rot that is clearly corroding liberal-democratic institutions. After I saw him destroy his opposition during the South Carolina primary, I stopped underestimating his ability to connect with a sizable part of the American electorate. There is nobody alive, probably, with a better instinctive grasp of how to use the (for profit) modern media logic to his advantage.

Second, I am assuming that we are in the midst of the second, great crisis for liberalism (the first occurred between 1914 and 1945; the second started in 2007). We have been spared great world wars (as of yet), but our liberal, national and international institutions have been found wanting in response to the financial crisis and the series of climate-induced famines/revolutions/civil wars. (To say this is not to deny that central banks did better than in 1929-35, but that sets the bar not very high.) The revival of interest among our youth in illiberal populisms, elite rule, and socialism all reflect this tendency--and who can blame them? I mention this crisis because any tactical diagnosis one offers may well, itself, be part of the larger problem. And so alongside daily politics, there has to be room for more strategic rethinking.

Charlottesville is a skirmish that helps reveal the contour of some of the things to come.

For, it shows that white nationalists (neo-fascists, klansmen, etc.) benefit from confrontation and media attention which recruits the sympathy of their natural supporters and would be allies. Their willingness to show their faces conveys the idea that they are ordinary citizens and this helps them recruit more members--thrill seekers and the earnest alike. (While perhaps few are explicitly drawn to their neonazi and [undoubtedly more] confederate symbolism, one has to be in denial not to recognize the racialized solidarity the nationalists exhibit with each other.) It matters hugely that these confrontations occur in cities and towns where the white nationalists are the underdog--this means they can predictably generate a response and also present themselves as courageous and embattled.

As confrontations escalate -- either through deliberate provocation or through all-to-predictable reaction from those who feel legitimately very threatened or from those that wish to ferment revolution--, the President will play his law-and-order-card alongside white solidarity, and so will aim to impose order that will resonate with fearful (and, alas, servile) citizens. Repeated scenes of street violence nudge people to law and order platforms and leaders. Because the police Stateside is badly trained, and, in many places, itself prone to excessive violence when threatened, we have every reason to expect a strategy of ongoing escalation to generate more scenes of turmoil and chaos. Because in many districts, the badly trained law-enforcement and the executive are not themselves immune from the pull of white nationalism (and their opposition is divided and not grasping the magnitude of the challenges we're facing),** this cycle will repeat on lots of levels.

So, while I have been wrong in my predictions about some events during the last eighteen months, I expect our crisis to deepen.

07/19/2017

If Dickens had been merely a comic writer, the chances are that no one would now remember his name....What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upper one. Joyce has to start with the frigid competence of Dubliners and end with the dream-language of Finnegan's Wake, but Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist are part of the trajectory. The thing that drove Dickens forward into a form of art for which he was not really suited, and at the same time caused us to remember him, was simply the fact that he was a moralist, the consciousness of ‘having something to say’. He is always preaching a sermon, and that is the final secret of his inventiveness. For you can only create if you can care. Types like Squeers and Micawber could not have been produced by a hack writer looking for something to be funny about. A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea. Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at. There is always room for one more custard pie.

[Dickens's] radicalism is of the vaguest kind, and yet one always knows that it is there. That is the difference between being a moralist and a politician. He has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong, all he can finally say is, ‘Behave decently’, which, as I suggested earlier, is not necessarily so shallow as it sounds. Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other. Dickens has not this kind of mental coarseness. The vagueness of his discontent is the mark of its permanence. What he is out against is not this or that institution, but, as Chesterton put it, ‘an expression on the human face.’ Orwell (1939) "Charles Dickens"

One of the great joys of reading Orwell's Essays, is to encounter his engagement with fellow writers (Mailer, Swift, Kipling, even Wodehouse, etc.). For, one of Orwell's great gifts is to articulate the political horizon, as it were, of the literary persona behind others' books in a sympathetic and critical fashion even though he may well disagree intensely.* Orwell simultaneously connects this persona to an image of the historical context of the author (e.g. in explaining why Kiping's outlook is pre-Fascist, "Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902"), the history of English literature as seen by Orwell, and the then present political-literary context. Dickens then comes to stand for a permanent possibility, an exemplar, of a certain kind of (literary) social critic: the moralist. This moralist is characterized early in the essay,

every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane...Useless to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

A lot of professional, political philosophers are moralists in Dickens's sense, without the comedy or vividness. That is, they would like the existing institutions to live up to the ideals inherent in them and wider social norms.** Unlike Dickens, they often seem happy to coerce others into living up to these ideals. In fact, once you have been alerted to this -- and I forgot who first got me to notice it -- liberal philosophers (my friends) endlessly prattle on about legitimacy, which is just another way of saying coercion is justified. But, as Orwell points out, Dickens is superior to my friends because (i) Dickens embraces a substantive ideal of the good, "radiant idleness," and (ii) he understands that the underlying problem with the status quo is something fundamental:

There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’.

On (i) Orwell does not need Leni Riefenstahl to remind him of the significance and pull of aesthetic visions (he uses Blake's poetry to make the point).+ What he recognizes, however, is that the liberal-moralist, too, requires it. And this points to the major void of much liberal reflection: because so much of it is formal and not substantive, it is incapable of presenting, let alone endorsing, a common aesthetic good and this puts liberals on the defensive when her ideals need to be mobilized.

On (ii) Orwell is no friend of Dickens's ideal; he reminds the reader that the vision of such idleness is grounded in "£500 a year," that is propertied-rentier income and, so, founded on the coercion needed to protect and stabilize property. But Orwell's more fundamental critique of this vision is its lack of "intellectual curiosity," including its lack of interest in machines, which, Orwell hopes, will create a progressive future if properly embedded in systematic change. (Some other time I'll return to Orwell's engagement with Swift on this very point.) But this (as it were) bright future has to accommodate itself to enduring human need and longing.

07/18/2017

To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is.--Orwell (1948) "Writers and Leviathan."

Liam Kofi Bright ignited discussion on Facebook of a (fairly) recent paper by (BHLer) Bas van der Vossen. This paper argues for a normative conception of the division of labor, between "consumers," that is, "activists," and producers, that is, political philosophers (19), of political philosophy such that pure specialization between them should be maintained:

for precisely those academics that work on politically relevant topics, most prominently among them political philosophers. For them, the university should become more like an Ivory Tower, not less.... the problem with these [political] activities is that they encourage us to think about ourselves in partisan terms. And this is incompatible with our academic professional responsibilities.--Bas van der Vossen (2015) "In Defense of the Ivory Tower: Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics" (1-2)

Before I get to his main argument, I want to note, first, that throughout his paper Van der Vossen equivocates among (i) 'working on politically relevant topics' and (ii) "those who are serious about thinking through political issues" and (iii) being "paid to think about politics." (On (iii) he notes that political philosophers do not have a monopoly and he also lists "sociology, political science, economics, gender studies, psychology." (2)) By this I do not mean that (i-iii) are not synonymous in the strict sense (they are not). Rather, there are quite a few sciences (genetics, climate-science, epidemiology, civil engineering, IT, etc.) that are politically extremely relevant, but that are not, in the first instance, about thinking about political issues (although, interestingly enough, it does happen). Because Van der Vossen ignores those latter sciences he can escape having to think about difficult, hybrid contexts where the distinction between consumer/producer is not so easy to draw. In what follows, where necessary, I distinguish between policy relevant research and research about politics and political issues.

Second, Van der Vossen's paper presupposes non-trivial commitments about the good life: "Many people stay out of political activism and they do just fine. Activism is not a necessary ingredient of a good life." (18) One need not be an elitist, a Republican-thinker, or a follower of Hannah Arendt to see that appealing to what "many people" do and that they are doing fine is an odd standard. The paper is also oddly complacent about the status quo (b) "many people in even the healthiest democracies around the world are not politically active and, in the grand scheme of things, these democracies seem to do just fine." (19) Even if this were true (when the paper was published in 2015 [i would reject this]) a cosmopolitan, political philosopher may take an interest in the health of transnational political subjects and promote these via transnational activism.

Third, and this is more important, Van der Vossen takes for granted that the bridge between consumers and producers of political philosophy can be bridged without the producers being politically active. His is a magical theory of dissemination; if you produce it, it will be consumed. This may be true for (lots of) highways, but it is rarely true otherwise. While there are many different ways in which the gap can be bridged between policy relevant research and politics, a key way is by way of what Merel Lefevere and I call aggregators. Aggregators are distinguished researchers, whose professional function is, in part, to act as an interface between research and policy. There are many different kinds of aggregators (journal editors, science policy-advisors, science-journalists, etc.) and not all of them maintain active research profile or need to do so. But because cutting edge research is often extremely complex/subtle it is important that some of the best researchers are also aggregators. In practice, these researchers-aggregators often have high prestige within the field (think of Singer, Pogge [sic], Nussbaum, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, Norman Daniels, etc.). (This is not the place to explore all the tricky issues pertaining to this class of researcher-aggregator, especially if they deviate from professional consensus and advocate their own views, but recall this post.) In some grant-driven environments, researchers are, in fact, expected by the grant agency to play some role as an aggregator or actively disseminate their research.

That he misses the very issue becomes clear when we turn to his argument (which he has helpfully summarized):

(1) People who take up a certain role or profession thereby acquire a prima facie moral duty to make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at their tasks

(2) The task of political philosophers is to seek the truth about political issues

(3) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at seeking the truth about political issues

(4) Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues

(5) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to avoid being politically active (17-18)

Aggregators clearly violate the conclusion of the argument, But one could accept all the premises of the argument, even its conclusions, and still see a need for aggregators in practice. That is, (5) is at best a defeasible duty. It becomes defeasible for two interesting, interdependent reasons: (a) research is esoteric, and so requires expertise to navigate; (b) political activists lack time to explore and master an esoteric realm.

In addition, it is, of course, also an empirical question if aggregators really become worse at their research. (This is not to deny that Van der Vossen draws on rich empirical research on the effects of partisanship and also about motivated reasoning and rationalization--including work by Dan Sperber that I happen to be reading this week, too.) I bet the most admired 20th century professional economists -- by other economists -- were Samuelson, Arrow, Friedman, and Keynes.* While the first two cultivated a decidedly technocratic image, it's hard to say they stayed out of politics--they certainly functioned as aggregators in the sense I use the word. Would they have been better at their craft if they stayed clear of policy relevance? That's hard to imagine. Their biases animate their research. Would they have been even better researchers if they stayed clear of policy and the role of aggregator? That's a tricky counterfactual. I am not confident it can be answered.

But I close with a final objection that is directed at the way Van der Vossen cashes out premises (3-4). For, he thinks that biased research is incompatible with the pursued of truth. That is, he conflates unbiased (and partisan) research with truth-apt research.** As the previous paragraphs make clear individual researchers are part of a larger epistemic process in which motivated reasoning may well have some use. In fact, this theme is a feature, not a bug, of the law, which is an adversarial process in which the conflict between motivated reasoning, advocacy, helps uncover the truth. Obviously, academic research is not fully analogous with that (and being lawyer-ly is, in an important sense, inimical to a proper, collaborative research ethos). But if we think of research as a community-activity, then we can immediate see that's compatible with individual bias--as long as these individual biases contribute to a social, epistemic process that is truth-conducive. (Regular readers will recognize in the previous sentence my interest in combating biases -- purportedly truth-apt status quo and hierarchy biases -- with other biases in research.) That is, the process requires mechanisms and filters that help to transform the biases in truth-conducive activity. There is a nice formal (see here for useful discussion) and empirical literature on the role of diversity in research, when it is or is not apt. [So, I am certainly not saying that all individual biases are good!] So, for (4) needs to be rewritten as follows:

(4+)Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues unless the research institutions in which we operate are designed to prevent our biases from undermining the epistemic process.

I started this post with a quote from Orwell. Throughout his writings, Orwell discusses the problems of partisanship and its relationship to (artistic) integrity (recall, for example, this post; and here). And he discerned that we should not conflate partisanship and group-think with all political activism. That is to say, he recognizes that party-politics and group-enforced ideology do corrupt (he was primarily interested in writing, but his arguments carry over easily to research). But the answer to this need not be political quietism or withdrawal into the ivory tower. The problem is party-politics and ideologies.

For, there are lots of ways one can be politically active in which one's research (artistic vision) need not be undermined at all. Sometimes this is due to functional role (e.g., recall the stuff above aggregators above). But sometimes is due to the fact that corrupting elements can be avoided. This is most clear in advocacy work on single issues (death penalty, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, basic income, human rights, racism, etc.). The researcher can be uncompromising in her single-issue advocacy and maintain her integrity. (Grant me the distinction between single-issue and systemic ideology.) Often this generates a kind of lack of moderation, even fanaticism in the name of truth. While there are problems with that, these are political problems not research problems.

07/17/2017

When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons....

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.--George Orwell (1939) Marrakech

Yesterday morning, while watching my son and his friends sell lemonade and cookies to raise money for the Grenfell Towers victims and the Royal Free -- a refrain they repeated all morning long, most effectively when they would corner a passer-by ready to climb up to the Heath -- on the South End, I was reminded, because I checked my email absentmindedly on my phone, that a promised tenure and promotion letter is due in two weeks; at once I recognized the foolishness of my intention to finish two overdue papers -- both in late stages of draft -- before I go on holiday this Friday (which becomes the de facto deadline for that tenure letter). After our lunch, we went to Daunt's to buy him a book, and there, while browsing, I noticed the Penguin edition of Orwell's Essays. I checked the index, and marked that "Reflections on Ghandi" -- an essay I blogged about admiringly, twice, in fact, [and here] -- was the last one. The collection lacks an editor and while I puzzled over my previous lack of curiosity about his other essays, my son called me from the sales counter; he was ready for me to pay for his selection. I grabbed the Essays and was secretly relieved when my son informed me he was too tired to frisbee and insisted on reading his book.

These days tourists still go to starved countries, but while for Orwell, "people with brown skins are next door to invisible," now the locals and their skin colors are noticed. I wouldn't say that it is the main purpose to return home from holiday in a packed, charter flight hungover while a kid is crying for the tablet in the row behind you, but we should not ignore the frisson of informing the neighbors, after some obligatory remarks about the shocking ways children are prostituted, that they lack sanitation and have too many babies, that we have a proper work ethic, and so on. (If you protest, my dear reader, that you would not be caught dead in a charter, I remind you of the pictures you posted on Instagram of yourself and your healthy friends enjoying a hearty meal after a day's volunteering in a dusty, crowded refugee camp.)* As Orwell puts it (in his remarkable essay, "Antisemitism in Britain,")"we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil."+

Orwell's Marrakech is about what it's like be an imperial master on the edge of the precipice, which is represented by the Senegalese soldiers, French citizens, who march by a "long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels." At that point there is,

one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.

Orwell's point is not to deny that colonial empires are gained through military force. But, rather, to insist that empires are kept through a master-servant ideology in which the imperial rulers dehumanize the conquered in various ways [invisible work; mass-anonymity; seen as animals; etc.], and makes him the enforcer of his own chains. Orwell assumes here the power of (the propagandist's) education and military drilling. (I am probably not the first to notice that the characterization of totalitarianism in 1984, owes something to his experience of being on the empire's side in colonial rule.) Orwell's faith in the power of education is not infinite--it's a matter of time before the game is up, and the guns are turned--but he does not underestimate it either. But beneath the facade of virile, imperial strength, he reveals a quiet terror, so manifest today in America's behavior toward its blacks and the Europeans toward its 'non-natives,' that the tables will be turned.

In context, Orwell is not much interested in the phenomenology of the oppressed even though he is capable of generating sympathy for them. He does not make the leap into Ellison's perspective, avant la lettre. It's not because he is incapable of writing from perspectives other than his own (-- I will return to his treatment of passive helplessness in "Inside the Whale"), after all the essay starts with an imaginative interpretation of the behavior of flies.** But Orwell's topic is to chart a certain psychological void at the heart of "modern civilization." Orwell exhibits colonial mastery (with the rhetorical trick of making visible that which he claims stays invisible) in order to make expressible set of experiences that survive the fall of empire as such.

That is, I suspect dark skins may be noticed by tourists now because of the end of direct military rule. But our military and technological superiority has not ended. So, the relationships of subordination and superiority have not evaporated (merely displaced), and the dark skins encountered abroad are inevitably, it seems, tracked with narratives that extol our (non-existent) moral superiority over them.

The surge of fondness for closed border-walls is a sign of fearful weakness--not merely a wise recognition of limits, but a retreat. The desire to keep them out, is a collective admission of our terror that the game is nearly up and we'll be treated the way we raped and killed them.

I looked up from Orwell's essays, my mind uneasily shifting to the morning's scene with the happy children singing and dancing selling the fresh lemonade and delicious, sprinkled cookies and (ahh) brownies, and just then I refuse to finish my train of ideas. For, after we had installed ourselves at the cafe, I glanced furtively -- guiltily aware of my prior lack of interest -- at the title of of the book I had bought for my son, who was reading it hungrily; it was David Walliams' The World’s Worst Children 2.

07/13/2017

We have identified four recommended actions which we believe to be especially effective in reducing an individual's greenhouse gas emissions: having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet. These suggestions contrast with other top recommendations found in the literature such as hang-drying clothing or driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle. Our results show that education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets. Focusing on high-impact actions (through providing accurate guidance and information, especially to 'catalytic' individuals such as adolescents) could be an important dimension of scaling bottom-up action to the transformative decarbonisation implied by the 2 °C climate target, and starting to close this gap.--Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas (2017) "The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions" Environmental Research Letters,Volume 12, Number 7 [HT Ingrid Robeyns]

A few years ago, because of the research of (my former BNI co-blogger) Ingrid Robeyns, I became aware of the fact that cutting edge climate science was putting demographic controls back on the political philosophical agenda. The previous sentence also reflects a bit of parochialism because there are places (e.g., China) where it never went away. But because (i) the Nazis had made eugenics disreputable, (ii) welfare states require a steady rise in working age populations (to pay for generous pensions, insurance, child-care, etc.), and (iii) economists quietly assumed that technological improvements would help solve any demographic problems (related, say, to Malthusian over-population), demographics were a subdued presence in the political philosophy of cold-war and thereafter liberalism.*

I wrote 'back' in the previous paragraph because the more I read, the more clear it is to me that for all the major theorists in the history of political philosophy and political economy through the middle of the twentieth century (recall this post on Berkeley's racialized eugenics), the control of populations is a crucial theoretical factor because (a) famines are very disruptive (and morally bad); (b) soldiers are needed for the military; (c) a growing, able population is good for the economy (and taken as a sign of proper functioning institutions); and (d) in the Platonic strain, desirable characteristics of the ruling elite ought to be bred for (in addition, to, of course, some mixture of (a-d)). One reason why Foucault's bio-politics made such a splash is that he revived the study of some of these characteristics from within the tradition.

Wynes & Nicholas base their claims about children on a 2009 article, "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals," Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax. While there is plenty to say about the modeling done here, today I focus on how we can see the effects of the anxiety produced by (i-iii) in the rhetoric and policies of Wynes & Nicholas and Murtaugh & Schlax. In both articles, when it comes to population control, the focus is on "reproductive choice" of individuals which are treated as "individual lifestyle choice." Amazingly, neither article even mentions the various subsidies and tax credits that the governments of rich countries give to promote having some children (often within marriage). The only tax that Wynes & Nicholas mention is a "carbon tax on food commodities."

If one is skeptical about massive norm/life-style changes (no flying and changing diet) and one is interested in promoting policy, and one is convinced we're heading for environmental catastrophe absent such policy, then, when reading Wynes & Nicholas, population reduction and living car-free are the low hanging fruit. As it happens, the car-free universe is suddenly all the rage for three technological reasons: first, due to improvements in AI, self-driving cars are on the horizon, and these are going to be safer and operated more efficiently; second, cheap electric cars are now within planning reach; third, due to software developments, car sharing is becoming insanely easy and cheap. Because in most cities space is limited (and expensive), these will make car ownership suddenly very unattractive economically and life-style-wise. This is why futurologists are predicting that the value added hub of transportation will shift toward Silicon Valley away from traditional car-towns.

As an aside, Stephen Davies has been alerting me to the growing bubble in car-loans and securitisation of these. The risks of this bubble has been getting some media attention already (see here). What has not been fully grasped yet, I suspect, is that, even leaving aside that bubble, in light of the developments of the previous paragraph, at some tipping point the second-hand-car market will collapse in value. And this means that a whole segment of the financial sector's business plans and collatoral will be worthless. I have seen no evidence that the stress-testing that financial institutions have been doing includes a collapse of the car-loan market.

To return to the main argument, a car-free-world is within reach.** Of course, "until the emissions associated with desired services are reduced to zero, population will continue to be a multiplier of emissions." And here is where the trouble starts. For enviornmental do-gooders destroying liberal welfare states, which (recall) require growing populations, is politically unattractive for two connected reasons: the welfare state is popular and in line with moral (Rawlsian) commitments and cutting benefits is politically hard to achieve. As it happens, (as Malthus already noted), as a population becomes wealthier and women are educated fertility goes down; this is why (leaving aside immigration) population has been growing slowly or even stagnating in many wealthy countries. The combined effect can be quite dramatic (as Japan, where the population is shrinking, is revealing). But because women are very educated and not very fertile in rich countries (you can play around with the OECD data here), the environmentally desirable big population gains can only be had elsewhere (again, I only became aware of something like this argument since 2013 through unpublished work by Ingrid Robeyns--this paragraph and the next few are not intended to do justice to the details of her unpublished arguments, but the musings were inspired by them).

With cars taken care off, controlling the fertility of primarily poor (and if the latest hope of technocratic-liberalism, President Macron, is to be believed, uncivilized) women becomes the central policy relevant factor that can help prevent environmental catastrophe. One need not be a feminist or have some sense of how ordinarily imperialism plays out to recognize that this is a recipe for many moral disasters (e.g., forced sterilizations/abortions, murder, taxes on children, etc.).

Of course, as noted, education is another factor driving down fertility (there is also evidence of this in sub-sahara Africa). So, in the short run, expect a lot more activity and publicity surrounding programs promoting and lengthening girls's and women's education in poor places. This has the nice feature of fitting a lot of pre-existing (Enlightenment and Feminist) emancipatory doctrines. (While this reduces fertility, populations with better human capital also aids economic growth, so the effect will not be only pro-environment.) Have the affective (sic!) altruists gotten on board yet?

07/12/2017

One of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1948 discovery of Knut Wicksell's unknown and untranslated dissertation, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen, buried in the dusty stacks of Chicago's old Harper Library. Only the immediate post-dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own dramatic example of learning by serendipity. Wicksell's new principle of justice in taxation gave me a tremendous surge of self-confidence. Wicksell, who was an established figure in the history of economic ideas, challenged the orthodoxy of public finance theory along lines that were congenial with my own developing stream of critical consciousness. From that moment in Chicago, I took on the determination to make Wicksell's contribution known to a wider audience, and I commenced immediately a translation effort that took some time and considerable help from Elizabeth Henderson, before final publication.

Stripped to its essentials, Wicksell's message was clear, elementary, and self-evident. Economists should cease proffering policy advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot, and they should look to the structure within which political decisions are made. Armed with Wicksell, I, too, could dare to challenge the still-dominant orthodoxy in public finance and welfare economics. In a preliminary paper, I called upon my fellow economists to postulate some model of the state, of politics, before proceeding to analyse the effects of alternative policy measures. I urged economists to look at the "constitution of economic polity," to examine the rules, the constraints within which political agents act. Like Wicksell, my purpose was ultimately normative rather than antiseptically scientific. I sought to make economic sense out of the relationship between the individual and the state before proceeding to advance policy nostrums.

Wicksell deserves the designation as the most important precursor of modern public-choice theory because we find, in his 1896 dissertation, all three of the constitutive elements that provide the foundations of this theory: methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange. I shall discuss these elements of analytical structure in the sections that follow. In Section V, I integrate these elements in a theory of economic policy. This theory is consistent with, builds upon, and systematically extends the traditionally accepted principles of Western liberal societies. The implied approach to institutional-constitutional reform continues, however, to be stubbornly resisted almost a century after Wicksell's seminal efforts. The individual's relation to the state is, of course, the central subject matter of political philosophy. Any effort by economists to shed light on this relationship must be placed within this more comprehensive realm of discourse.---James Buchanan ("1986 Nobel Lecture") The Constitution of Economic Policy

l have quoted the first three paragraphs of Buchanan's Nobel lecture. In what follows I focus on the second paragraph. So, let me just say about the first paragraph that while there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the charming opening vignette nor the significance of Wicksell to the history of public-choice theory, one can also recognize in it Buchanan's rhetorical and political savvy to know that his Swedish audience will be pleased by the praise for their compatriot (himself an important influence on Swedish economics). Buchanan's sometime collaborator, Gordon Tullock (who gets a mention in the lecture), was notably absent from that stage and was not known to exhibit such savvy. One may even say that it is consistent with the best insights of public-choice (and Tullock deserves praise for this [recall]) that opportune expressions of praise are, alas, an ineleminable part of the politics of academic recognition and credit.

In addition, Buchanan signals the importance of leisure and serendipity, which is the loveliest consequence of life's uncertainty. I go beyond the text by suggesting that the conditions that make serendipity possible are leisure, a scarce resource itself rooted in structural features of a political economy, and well-prepared minds--it's not just anybody that wanders around the old Harper library.

Okay, let's turn to the second paragraph. Buchanan is clear that his is a normative project. And while there is plenty to criticize in public choice with the tools of philosophy, what philosophers can learn from his project has not been fully assimilated. For I think his claims here can be decoupled from his commitment to "methodological individualism, homo economicus, and politics-as-exchange." What follows is a bit abstract and, for the sake of brevity, non-polemical (so without some juicy examples). I rewrite the key claims here as follows:

Philosophers should cease proffering policy and normative advice as if they were employed by a benevolent despot,+

When philosophers offer policy and normative guidance we should look to the structure within which political and normative decisions are made.

That is, too much policy-relevant, and ethically salient, philosophy assumes that the conditions under which the uptake of our ideas takes place is irrelevant. This is so despite the very sophisticated traditions of theorizing about the context-sensitivity of assertion (e.g., De Rose). Obviously, the previous sentence is an exaggeration in two senses: first, philosophers are (recall) increasingly willing to apply, reflexively, ideas about inductive risk (Douglas), epistemic injustice (Fricker), and epistemic violence (Dotson) to the norms and institutions of philosophy itself. Second, philosophers have become very interested in non-ideal theorizing as is evidenced by the interest in, say, feasibility constraints (I link to Brennan's work because Brennan himself is influenced by public choice). But non-ideal theory is, as of yet (correct me if I am wrong), not yet context-specific theorizing.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph may generate anxiety about relativism. A lot of my philosophical friends want to make general or invariant claims. While I do not share such anxiety, I think we can tame the anxiety if we follow a version of the third key claim:

Philosophers should explicitly postulate and model the state/politics, before proceeding to propose measures.

That is, we should analyze and make explicit the political and social conditions under which we speak as normative and theoretical authorities and model the possible uptake of our proposals. For, by doing this we do not undermine the validity of our claims; rather we allow these to be progressively adapted, if necessary, to further salient conditions. That is, by engaging in this modeling exercise we became adept at recognizing and making explicit the factors that are salient to our practices. This last can then feedback into a process of mutual criticism and learning and so make our theorizing less fragile to hidden assumptions.

Of course, the proposed modeling exercise is not needed if we only speak to each other, or if we don't care about what our words do.

07/11/2017

All absolute governments must very much depend on the administration; and this is one of the great inconveniences attending that form of government. But a republican and free government would be an obvious absurdity, if the particular checks and controuls, provided by the constitution, had really no influence, and made it not the interest, even of bad men, to act for the public good. Such is the intention of these forms of government, and such is their real effect, where they are wisely constituted: As on the other hand, they are the source of all disorder, and of the blackest crimes, where either skill or honesty has been wanting in their original frame and institution.

I.III.4

So great is the force of laws, and of particular forms of government, and so little dependence have they on the humours° and tempers of men, that consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from them, as any which the mathematical sciences afford us.--David Hume "That Politics May be Reduced to a Science."

At first glance, Hume is defending here a species of republicanism. But Hume's lines here were also taken to be the founding text of a normative, research program of institutional design ('wise constitution'), which takes itself to create institutions in which the incentives are such that it is in the self-interest of even bad people to promote the "public good" including ones distinct from Hume's republican commitments. This project is historically associated with a careful reader of Hume, Madison, who wrote that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary" (which echoes Spinoza's Political Treatise 6.3: "if human nature were so constituted, that men most desired what is most useful, no art would be needed to produce concord")+ and philosophically with a range of thinkers from Kant's race of "devils" all the way to Buchanan and Tullock's public choice theory. As Kant puts it in Perpetual Peace:

In fact, Hume need not be taken to be defending republicanism. All he is saying that republicanism would be an absurdity, in the sense of an internal practical contradiction, if one assumed that "the particular checks and controuls, provided by the constitution, had really no influence." That is, Hume is saying that even republicanism -- a normative program -- presupposes that it is empirically true that humans are responsive to systematic incentives and interests. (I leave aside here, to what degree and in what way Hume actually embraced a normative/empirical distinction.)

In the right contexts this empirical fact, that humans are responsive to systematic incentives and interests, allows one to deduce "consequences almost as general and certain" as "any which the mathematical sciences afford us." Here Hume connects his program for political science to his great program for the "science of Man" in the Introduction of the Treatise:

(Reversing Spinoza order of presentation we may say that) Spinoza self-consciously sets out to offer a pleasing science of man. In this causal science there is no room for moralizing about original sin and other purported defects of human nature. Rather, Spinoza treats the passions as (hidden causal) properties of human nature from which effects can be deduced. Spinoza denies that his conclusions are original; rather they conform to existing practice. While Spinoza does not explicitly say his conclusions are as secure as other natural sciences, his choice of contrast class (meteorology) suggests he is not setting the bar beyond reach.

As an aside, I have intimated here (and elsewhere) that Hume that Spinoza would have read Spinoza's Political Treatise. This does not preclude the reality that Hume and Spinoza read the same sources (Machiavelli, especially, but also More and Bacon).

Let me wrap up. In the title of this post, and above I noted that Buchanan (a student of Knight) and Tullock's public choice theory is one of the modern heirs of this (Spinoza-Humean) Socratic political theory.** This fact is less surprising if we remember that as late as 1964 the reality of Socratic political theory kind was explicitly presupposed -- in the context of cold war rivalry -- by the Chicago economist (and also a student of Knight), George Stigler, and made conceptually possible the proper competence of the economist as such; "consists in understanding how an economic system works under alternative institutional frameworks." (Presidential Address to the American Economics Association; recall this post.) Needless to say, the contemporary mainstream economist lacks such competence nor wishes for it. If Stigler is correct, then in our life-time, a Kuhn-loss has taken place in front of our eyes. That is to say, public choice represents a vision for political economy that is rooted in older intellectual traditions. How to sort the traditional elements from the modern innovations is the topic for a series of future posts.

07/10/2017

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.

“All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.'--Nicholas Kristof (feb 15, 2014) The New York Times.

Periodically the New York Times reflects on the lack of public intellectuals among academics today (see also here; and here; here, etc.). I ignore to what degree the true public intellectual is ever an academic (yes, I have heard of Habermas). When one reads through the pieces the Times devotes to the issue, academics are castigated for a recurring list of ills: esoteric specialization and professionalization, writing in inaccessible, turgid prose, and lack of relevance. Sometimes, too, it's noted that society may be anti-intellectual. But the pieces never note that the main reason for the decline of the public intellectual is The New York Times (and its sibling mainstream media) itself.* And by this I do not mean, leaving aside the few columns of true news reporting, the fact that its pages primarily seem to be devoted to documenting the life-styles and passing thoughts of the wealthy and famous.

First, the definition of news/newsy that newspapers use is the central obstacle to the participation of intellectuals in the public sphere. News is (a) that which dominates the headlines in the latest 24hrs cycle; (b) what the editor thinks it is. (It's possible that (a) is conceptually and temporarily prior to (b).) This means that rapid responsiveness is the central quality any would be-public intellectual must possess. Now (as Twitter reveals) plenty of smart people are good at fast thinking and, with practice, fast writing. So, rapidity is not the main problem, although the focus on news does screen out thoughts that may have to germinate. Rather, the main problem with the focus on news is that only news-responsiveness is worth publishing. This means that any space for public intellectuals is essentially reactive.

This last point entails that nearly all intellectual work that appears in print is opportunistic. That it is opportunistic is clear from the fact that the stuff that makes it in print recycles (policy/conceptual) stances that were known prior to publication (or promote their forthcoming books): any problem X can be solved by a fairly narrowly constrained list Y, including more markets, better families, less pollution, more racial awareness, more education, more surveillance powers to the state, less democracy, more conservatives in higher education, and, of course, less academic specialization, etc.

Second, and related, because one has to be responsive to the news-cycle, the public intellectual has to be policy-prescriptive. News means there is an urgent problem. Urgent problems require decisive solutions; they do not leave much room for critical analysis, for strategic, long-term thinking, for the weighing of evidence in the service of multiple scenarios, for the diagnoses of underlying symptoms, etc. Newspapers and media don't want to give space to unprovoked-by-news editorials explaining the limitations of existing policy, the likely downside risks short of the apocalypse of the status quo, or some interesting fact about the culture that remains interesting eighteen months from now. So, the would be public intellectual must have a nose for news, be either over-confident in her solutions or alarmist (or both). Undoubtedly, that makes for great entertainment. By contrast, a public intellectual culture requires a willingness to return to topics and themes ahead of the news. Newspapers cultivate such a culture for a reading public, or it does not exist.

Third, the (for profit) mass media are chasing the lowest-common-denominator-eye-balls. In practice, this means that pieces have to be short (between 550-800 words) even though, with the migration to online, space is really not a consideration anymore. This entails that between the first paragraph hook and the forceful conclusion, there is barely any space for analysis, argument, and evidence that might support either. In addition, the permitted vocabulary and sentence structure are appropriate to high school level. (Yes, I need to give you something to quote.) That politicians may speak at fifth or sixth grade level may be smart politics. That newspapers are increasingly following their example is a major barrier to public intellectual life. As Kristof's passage reveals, subordinate clauses get eliminated, and single sentence paragraphs become the norm.

The previous paragraph should not be confused with questions about readability. Love and respect copy-editors. They greatly improve any work that comes their way (including the rejected ones). Simplicity of expression is not the enemy of complex thought.

Fourth, newspapers love controversy and traffic, and so become irresponsible in their-unwillingness to curate their comments section. As many have noted this means that writing for the public means exposing oneself to abuse and various threats, which, in turn, encourage others to send private threats. The lack of curation means that any topic will be hijacked by parties interested in promoting themselves or their causes. What self-respecing, would-be-public intellectual wants to be the mere (Malebrancheian) occasion for others to mouth off?

So, when the Times recycles the meme of the disappearing intellectual, ask it to look into the mirror or tweet this blog post (which is under 1000 words).

Lotteries. There are fair/egalitarian lotteries, where all of us have an equal chance at some good. Almost no goods are distributed in this way. And there are unfair lotteries, where goods and talents are distributed selectively. Few mechanisms that are unfair lotteries are called that; they go by the name of inheritance or innate talents.

Nepotism. Distribute goods based on patronage or family connections.

Markets. The price-mechanism brings supply and demand together. This entails that some demand is unmet because of budget constraints of individuals/consumers (or supply ruptures, etc.). Some purists may not call this an instance of rationing, but the classical economists recognized that even in well functioning markets for a staple, a bad harvest could cause starvation for very poor folk. (They generally argued that overtime the alternatives created worse conditions.)

Weberian rule following without budget constraint. A service or good is supplied as long as the rules are followed. So, for example, one could acquire a passport (a driver's license, etc.) as long as one meets certain eligibility requirements.

Weberian rule following with budget constraint. A service or good is supplied as long as it follows the eligibility rules and stays within a certain budget. This is familiar enough because it creates end-of-year shortages (or, if savings are not allowed to be carried over, spending splurges). So, in places with socialized medicine, it is not unfamiliar that some ('non-emergency') procedures stop being offered, say, in November.

The list is not meant to be exhaustive and, obviously, there are lots of hybrid forms of rationing. Now, I called the last few rule following forms of rationing 'Weberian,' to emphasize that these are the classical form of distribution in modern, bureaucratic states. And besides consideration of efficiency, it appeals to important moral-political values of impartiality, neutrality, universality, and equality. (Of course, in practice the Weberian state is not so impartial and neutral.)

With the growth of the welfare state, rule following with budget constraint became the norm for lots of public goods. Because budget constraints create visible shortages (and opportunities for corruption and nepotism), it also has been a site for conceptual innovation within a Weberian framework. Here I call attention to two examples.

First, the marxist-Chicago economist, Oskar Lange, proposed to create (computer generated) simulated markets to assist the government planner in setting production and price targets (recall here and here). Because computer power is cheap now and data increasingly available, this will become increasingly widespread (including in private industry--Facebook rations what we encounter on our screen in some such way [our attention being the scarce good]).

Second, while the budget constraint is imposed from above, control over the budget is devolved to some mid-level functionary/bureaucracy in order to promote efficient and timely responsiveness (within a rule-governed context). The history of the evolution of the modern welfare state, is, in part, a shifting around of the bureaucratic level at which this control is set. The so-called new public management, by which I mean the set of practices that use business-style and market-friendly jargon and measures is an outgrowth of this second style of innovation. Often the introduction of these practices and jargon were accompanied by a tighter budget constraint (a cut).* While there is a lot to be said about new public management (and neo-liberalism), as long as it is based on rules it is compatible with the Weberian state. (This is not to deny the dangers associated with what Judith Butler calls “petty-sovereigns.”) But increasingly there exists an alternative form of rationing:

Professional judgment with budget constraints. These are cases where a skilled functionary (a physician, a social worker, an engineer, an accountant, a consultant, etc.) is given a budget and a broad legal framework in which to operate and can than use his/her own judgment to supply goods and services (including referrals, etc.)

Professional judgment with budget constraints respects the autonomy and expertise of the skilled functionary and allows that s/he can use contextual cues to make informed, local decisions based on his/her judgment in an efficient manner. In many medical systems/HMOs the family physician/general practitioner is given a budget (and a number of patients) and then can use his/her judgment to treat and refer patients as they see fit. In some countries, social work is also organized like this. Of course, it is not entirely rule-free and may well be governed by lots of rules, including following 'best practices,' national 'guidelines,' etc. In some professions, this form of rationing is further constrained by long-standing important professional norms/ethics/codes of conduct that are part of professional training.

For those that wish to maintain forms of self-governance among the professional class rationing by way of reliance on their professional skill, expertise, and judgment with budget constraint is very attractive. In addition, one further important feature of working with a system of budget constraints for professional judgment is that it becomes possible to share the efficiency gains with the professional functionary. So, for example, a GPs office can pay a profit (or salary) to the GP if s/he stays within budget (etc.). This last feature also points to some of the dangers in which the interests of the professional and her patient may not coincide. (Of course, this may be true in other forms of rationing too!)

But here I want to close by noting that in addition to their skill, judgment, and expertise it is to be expected that experts will also use other means to stay within budget. One such means is what I call affective nudging** (recall):

An affective nudge alters people's behavior in a predictable way by drawing the insights of the best psychological (and neuro-scientific, experimental etc.) knowledge about relatively stable framing effects and cognitive biases without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere affective nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap . Nudges are not mandates. Nudges occur at nodes in the choice architecture, where the means of attaining a policy-goal are under-specified and where the nature of these means is left to staff within some parameters.

There are two crucial difference between a nudge and an affective nudge. First, affective nudges cannot be easily avoided and so they come closer to attempts at skilled manipulation. Often the citizen has no genuine choice but the deal with the bureaucracy/government service, etc. Second, nudges are micro phenomena--they occur in the interaction between bureaucracy and citizen (or non-citizen) where policy is implemented (and, presumably, de-politicized). It is increasingly recognized that governments aim to shape the affects of populations. Affective nudging is a central component of such shaping in our polities.

Affective nudging is increasingly ubiquitous. Some of its appearances are welcome -- politeness, empathy, friendliness, etc. --, but, in practice, the adoption of affective nudging also corrupts the ends that even very public spirited civil servants are meant to serve. But that's for another occasion.*

An affective nudge alters people's behavior in a predictable way by drawing the insights of the best psychological (and neuro-scientific, experimental etc.) knowledge about relatively stable framing effects and cognitive biases without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere affective nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap . Nudges are not mandates. Nudges occur at nodes in the choice architecture, where the means of attaining a policy-goal are under-specified and where the nature of these means is left to staff within some parameters. There are two crucial difference between a nudge and an affective nudge. First, affective nudges cannot be easily avoided and so they come closer to attempts at skilled manipulation. Often the citizen has no genuine choice but the deal with the bureaucracy/government service, etc. Second, nudges are micro phenomena--they occur in the interaction between bureaucracy and citizen (or non-citizen) where policy is implemented (and, presumably, de-politicized). It is increasingly recognized that governments aim to shape the affects of populations. Affective nudging is a central component of such shaping in our polities. Affective nudging is increasingly ubiquitous. Some of its appearances are welcome -- politeness, empathy, friendliness, etc. --, but, in practice, the adoption of affective nudging also corrupts the ends that even very public spirited civil servants are meant to serve. But that's for another occasion.*

An affective nudge alters people's behavior in a predictable way by drawing the insights of the best psychological (and neuro-scientific, experimental etc.) knowledge about relatively stable framing effects and cognitive biases without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere affective nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap . Nudges are not mandates. Nudges occur at nodes in the choice architecture, where the means of attaining a policy-goal are under-specified and where the nature of these means is left to staff within some parameters.

Affective nudging is increasingly ubiquitous. Some of its appearances are welcome -- politeness, empathy, friendliness, etc. --, but, in practice, the adoption of affective nudging also corrupts the ends that even very public spirited civil servants are meant to serve. In particular, because of the existence of explicit and tacit cognitive biases among experts, and the unequal distribution of social capital and emotional intelligence among the population, it foresee-ably creates new forms of unequal outcome patterns among citizens.***